Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s new film, Anomalisa is almost demonically impressive in the way it fits its convincing story of human frailty into a bizarre shock corridor of stop-motion animation.
After all, these guys could have just made a straight film with flesh-and-blood actors using the material to hand and it would have been a fine indie film in a sort of neo-Hitchcockian mode. But, no, they wanted to be brazen and utterly original and make something unique.
The two leads – if one can call these puppets that – are motivational speaker Michael Stone, who is voiced with incredible power by David Thewlis. Lisa, the woman he falls for is voiced with equal strength of character by Jennifer Jason Lee. Theirs is to be the one-night stand of an unhinged man and a naive young woman rendered as a piece of visual art that, in its own way, is utterly ravishing.
The David Thewlis-voiced character, Michael Stone, broods in his hotel room
Singular and mysterious because of his broad Northern English accent, Michael has arrived in Cincinatti, Ohio, an exotic creature to the annoyingly effusive taxi-driver who takes him from the airport to his hotel. Once checked in, he goes through the usual motions of accustoming himself to his soulless lair where he is booked in for just one night. One gathers that life as the husband and father (to one son) is not the best, as he phones an old flame in the city and they hook up with sad results. In the meantime, this chain-smoking creature under pressure prepares the motivational talk which he is scheduled to give in the city the following day.
Facing up time: existential angst and love in a hotel room in Anomalisa
By complete accident, after knocking on the door of another room, he meets Lisa, who has travelled from nearby Akron with a friend to attend Michael's talk. He nicknames her `Anomalisa’ because she tells him that she likes the word anomaly. She discovered the word in his best-selling motivational book, and he is, as it happens, something of a star in that crowded market.
Mirror, mirror on the wall..Michael Stone faces up to the fact that he is cracking up
Lisa casts a spell on Michael Stone because, despite being a puppet, she doesn’t speak or look like everybody else, all those other puppet figures with their hinged faces and blank eyes. She is somehow insistently human, she is a valid personality who stands out from banality and greyness.
Stone is attracted to her because her voice is female - all the other characters, male and female alike, are voiced by one male actor, making them ancillary players in the saga. Lisa's lack of self-confidence also seduces Stone - which is ironic given that he is ostensibly in the confidence-building business - as does her self-consciousness about a facial scar. And so, you watch like a hawk to see how the pair get on.
Make no mistake, Anomalisa is one of the most enrapturing daring and moving films you will see this year.
Paddy Kehoe
